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As Thanksgiving approaches, you might be thinking about
the history of Thanksgiving you learned in elementary school--and then
of the various corrections to that history you learned as your education
progressed (I hope!). One of the latest blows to the old-school history
of Thanksgiving is brought by Charles Mann's new book, (Knopf 2005).
Check it out! It's an eye-opener.
In this iconoclastic spirit of Thanksgiving, I want
to offer you a few literary highlights that illuminate another aspect of
history that has been badly in need of major corrections: the history of
non-heterosexual romance. Romantic relationships that we today might call
gay, lesbian, or bisexual have occurred in all different shapes and sizes
in all kinds of historical periods (look again at Shakespeare's sonnets,
or Byron's life, or Willa Cather's, for a few examples of especially well-known
literary-historical names).
There is a fun and smart body of contemporary literature
that helps revise the old-school version of "heteros-only" history.
If you find yourself really enjoying some of this literature, then send
me an email (). This sub-genre has been my primary obsession
for years, and I'd love to talk with you more about it. For the time being,
however, I thought I would offer just a few selected highlights, each of
which is simply great and fun literature as well as being deeply insightful
about re-thinking this aspect of history
Both of these are wonderful reads and are also carefully researched stories about
two men with whom Alexander the Great was deeply in love. If you liked Oliver
Stone's recent film about Alexander, then you'll like Fire from Heaven even
better; if you didn't like the Stone film, then this novel will cleanse your
palate of any nasty aftertaste from the film. The Persian
Boy tells about a
romance the Stone film hardly touches; told from the perspective of the Persian
eunuch, Bagoas, it offers a beautifully and thoughtfully multicultural as well
as anti-heterosexist view of Alexander's life and times.
Creating a setting at once both more antiquated and more contemporary than Renault's,
Merlis's novel offers a wild and archly ironic retelling of the Trojan War
in which minor deities and ancient heroes mix with credit cards and MacDonalds
(think the Brad Pitt Troy on acid--and no, Achilles and Patroclus are not lovers
in this re-telling; it's up to something more devious). It is a postmodern
narrative that juxtaposes the history laid out in Homer's Iliad and Sophocles's
Philoctetes with the more recent history of the advent of AIDS in the early
1980s. Fun for the whole family (okay, a bit too racy for the little ones),
and not to be missed.
No, not the film version--don't make me go there. Spielberg did his thing, and
Walker says she was happy because she wanted the story to reach the broadest
audience possible; so who am I to gainsay it? But the film largely (not absolutely
entirely) bowdlerizes the lesbian and bisexual romance at the novel's core.
Who needs a core, anyway? Well, I won't go there, like I said, but suffice
it to say the book is a very different animal, not only sexually but also literarily:
the tone of the book is completely different from that of the film. Celie's
magic, as a narrator, is to adumbrate her eventual transformation in even the
most painful, early passages through her playfully ironic and powerfully comedic
tone of voice. Walker imagined a hidden history behind the story of her own
real-life grandmother's history, and in doing so Walker helped enable others
to realize the traces of an African-American lesbian history all but erased
by the "official" history books (for further literary examples, check
out Cheryl Dunye's The Watermelon Woman; there are also some brilliantly iconoclastic
scholarly re-readings of Cleopatra Jones that are sure to put some curl back
in your hair)
Run, don't walk, to get this book! The most recent of the offerings I've listed
here, the literary world has not stopped talking about the immense power of
O'Neill's retelling of Ireland's Easter Uprising--not to mention that he got
a humongous advance for his second novel (not yet written, let alone published--if
you want the dish on that, come sit by me) based on this staggering debut.
Densely rich with insightful reflections on Irish culture and history (on the
literary side of things, you'll find Wilde and Joyce haunting the pages, as
well as lesser-known Irish luminaries), it's also just a beautiful story. Even
the crabbier critics were stunned into admiration. I can't tell you more, because
this is one of those novels in which the texture of the storytelling is the
best part--and the best way to get a sense of that texture is to read it for
yourself; so get moving! All I can say is, when I finished it, I figured I
must have helped some extra-desperate old lady cross the street in a previous
life, because I otherwise can't explain how I could be so fortunate to have
a job that actually pays me to read books like these. (It also pays me to grade
papers, so don't get carried away with envy just yet.) What are you doing still
sitting there?
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